The Postmodern Worldview (Part 3)

Lesslie Newbigin’s seminal book on missiology, Foolishness to the Greeks, discusses the matter of realizing and articulating the authentic, historic Christian kerygma, in the midst of our contemporary culture. He brings his vast experience of cross-cultural evangelism to bear on examining the essential good news of the Christian faith in contrast to the culturally bound trappings of western Christianity. From his vantage point of being a virtual stranger to western culture after being in the foreign mission field for so long, he distinguishes between contextualizing the true gospel to our western mindset, and indiginizing (or adapting) the message to that mindset. He insists, with al-Ghazali (the Muslim theologian and mystic), that Christians must distinguish between the true signs of transcendence and the false ones through sober rational assessment.

Newbigin argues that the authority for distinguishing between the true and the false signs of transcendence is the Christian Scriptures. He contrasts the authentic approach to the Bible from several historic, popular approaches to it. He dismisses the “fundamentalist” approach to treating the Bible in a wooden literal sense. He rejects the popular Gnostic approach to the Bible where it is used as a personal spiritualist text that merely confirms one’s esoteric experiences. He also spurns the use of the Bible as an encyclopedia of morality. He refuses the neo-orthodox view of the hidden, divine story behind the story of the Bible approach. Instead, he embraces (with Frei, Lindbeck, and others) the approach to the authority of the Bible that sees in this document of divine origin the true witness that “renders accessible to us the character and actions and purposes of God.”

Newbigin investigates what the true witness of the Scriptures has to offer in its dialogue with science and politics. These two pillars of modernist, secular ideology are dealt with clearly and definitively. Newbigin makes a great case for the Christian’s confidence in the midst of opposing views. Here, Newbigin does what Alister McGrath commends us to do, challenging believers to “rattle their cages,” rather than seeing themselves as being “in the cage getting rattled.”

Finally, Newbigin challenges the postmodern Church of Jesus Christ to continue to be the authentic faith community it has always been within the context of every culture; influencing our culture as agents of profound relatedness in bonds of mutual love and obedience that reflect the mutual relatedness in love that is the being of the Triune God himself. This is done, Newbigin says, by being communities of transformative truth and grace, and by being led by the Holy Spirit into all understanding. In this way, Christians can boldly engage in dialogue with science and politics (or any other ideology of any age) with confidence in the person of Jesus Christ and the knowledge of his revealed truth found in the Scriptures.

The Postmodern Worldview (Part 2)

Much of postmodern revolution has been seen as a threat to biblical Christianity. It must be stressed, however, that everywhere postmodernism has judged modernism to be wrong, it is right, and everywhere the Church has replaced biblical faith with modernist faith, it is wrong. Placing faith in natural science or human rationalism is idolatry. Reducing the revelation of God to “principles to live by” is flawed. Placing the self at the center of reality, independent of a distant God, over others and creation, is erroneous.

The Church must not conform to the patterns of its day (Rom. 12:2); it must vigorously engage the imagination of its contemporary setting. It is a postmodern world and the Church must engage the milieu of its environment as the missional agency of God. Premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism are all active and observable in the contemporary Christian context. One can observe a kind of active premodern faith in sectarian institutions and their superstitions in some forms of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. One can observe a kind of active modernist faith in the rational, principle-based approaches of various fundamentalist and evangelical traditions. One can also observe a kind of active postmodern faith in the spiritualism found in certain experientially based, neo-pentecostal movements. All forms of Christian expression must be evaluated against the biblical paradigm revealed by God, while every cultural context must be engaged with the Bible’s message. One can utilize what is positive about each culture’s contextual paradigm and connect it to Spiritual formation through authentic contextualized preaching of the Word of God.

Lorne Wilkinson sees the rise of this new, proud, and popular philosophy in western culture as a throwback to ancient, earthy cults, while at the same time, is a hip, eco, pseudo (post-quantum physics) science-loving, postmodern, marketing-savvy religious phenomenon. Wilkinson lives in Vancouver, which is the Mecca of Canadian left-coast ideologies, and boasts a historically low church attendance of 2 percent of the population. In a recent survey of adolescents, 75 percent of British Columbian teenagers reported having no religious affiliation whatsoever. Wilkinson is aware of these statistics and lives amongst the people who embody them. One could despair over the lack of commitment to the historic, biblical, Christian faith of a generation ago. Wilkinson, however, sees great opportunities for the gospel to be heard in new and fresh ways. He also demonstrates, through his understanding of these throwback ideologies, something of authentic, Christian spirituality, which has been lost through Evangelicalism's ties with the modernist agenda.

Over the last 400 years, the western Church has identified too much with the Newtonian paradigm of the universe. The collective realization of God was lost. Wilkinson argues for a rescuing of this respect for the earth and a capitulation to the “spiritualities” of neopaganism where they have got it right. Here is common ground for introducing people to the Creator of the earth, the God of the universe. Wilkinson argues that Christians do not need to be afraid of these people. They have more to fear from us. In the past, rather than seeing where God may be revealing himself to them through his creation, Christians burned many of them at the stake.

The Postmodern Worldview (Part 1)

Just as modernist philosophers began to question premodern assumptions long before the modernist Enlightenment took hold of western civilization, postmodern philosophers and artists began to challenge the ideas and mores of the modernist paradigm. Near the turn of the 20th Century, Virginia Woolf wrote scandalous stories that challenged the accepted mores of human sexuality. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity challenged the accepted ideas of Newtonian science. Karl Marx challenged the rightness of western capitalist commerce. Ideas like these took time to sink into the popular imagination.

One event, however, shattered the entrenched optimism of modernism in western civilization more than any other. At a time when it was assumed that with enough good western science, education, medicine, government, and religion, modernism could conquer every problem and virtually bring heaven to earth, the two nations that had the best western science, education, medicine, government, and religion went to war in the most horrific conflict the world had yet witnessed. Germany and England (and their allies) fought across Europe, devastating a continent and a generation. Following WW1 was a global influenza pandemic, a global economic depression, and a second world war. By the 1950s, western optimism was replaced with a new pessimism that precipitated the revolutionary postmodern paradigm shift.

As modernism was in every way a reaction to premodernism, so postmodernism is in every way a reaction to modernism. Every way that postmodernism judges modernism as wrong, it is right. Unfortunately, though, postmodernism sets up a just-as-wrong alternative to biblical revelation.

The optimistic secular worldview of modernism has been replaced with a pluralistic worldview. David Henderson writes, "Postmodernism is a rejection of Enlightenment thinking, the rationalism and optimism of the modern world. Purpose, design, objective truth, absolutes, and any idea of overarching “metanarratives” or “totalizing discourses” are thrown out the window. Instead, postmodernism embraces the nihilism of and perspectivism of Nietzche and the existentialism of Sartre. Life is pointless. There is no inherent meaning or purpose in life and there is no truth."

The politically correct liberalism of postmodern western civilization accepts all opinions as being pluralistically “true.” The concept of “truth” itself has been deconstructed and is now popularly understood to be a perspective, and only one piece of a pluralist mosaic of opinions. Therefore, contradictory ideas can be held to be mutually “true” in that they merely represent differing perspectives.

In the post-Einstein world, human reason was found to be an unreliable arbiter for understanding reality. Postmodernism has replaced rationalism with sentimentalism. Human experience and feelings have replaced reason as the most trustworthy, final authority. If the truth about life and faith is relative, one can rely on personal experience and personal revelation to be as – or even more – authoritative as the Scriptures.

Life, then, is governed not by principles, but by personal preference. There is a post-liberal idea in postmodernism that suggests that Jesus and the Bible may be true for Christians, but not necessarily for others. In the smorgasbord of religious ideas available to the western postmodern person, the individual’s personal preference is the final governance for life and faith practice. The highest form of religious freedom is the liberty of each individual to make personal choices in every area of life and faith.

The place of God in the imaginations of postmoderns has been replaced by a myriad of spiritualities. This contemporary western generation is religiously sophisticated. It is exposed to a plethora of religious traditions and ideas, which are being picked over, accepted, and combined with pluralistic zeal to create new, relativistic, personal religions. John Stackhouse Jr. writes, When it comes to ultimate matters, then, many of our North American neighbors have resorted to a secularism that frees one from all religious authority to a hyper-individualistic “religion a la carte.” Indeed, our society’s tolerance of do-it-yourself religion is, itself, a manifestation of secularization. For in leaving questions of the reality of God or the gods up to each individual, this attitude implies that there really aren’t any such supernatural entities."

The highest value for postmoderns is tolerance. The least tolerated notion from modernism is the idea that one religious expression is better than another. It is interesting that angels, demons, ghosts, and miracles are more prevalent in popular postmodern culture than they were in the modernist context. American movies and television, capitalizing on the religious milieu of the nation and the surprising popularity of Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, are addressing issues of the supernatural and religious. Meanwhile, mainline churches in North America are losing adherents at an alarming rate.

The place of the self in the postmodern context is “unanchored” and responsible to no one. There is a fixation with the freedom of the adolescent lifestyle in popular western culture. Staying young, fit, and active are the highest of values, while responsibility, wisdom, and maturity are abhorred. The place of others is seen in terms of their value in serving the self. Others are there for the self to use. Relationships become means to an end in the service of personal fulfillment. The self exploits the relationship to get what it can from the other and then discards the other when it is of no more use to the self. This is a disposable culture. Marriages, churches, friends, and business associations can all be discarded when they no longer serve the perceived needs of the self. No-fault divorce is an invention of the postmodern western world. It is simply a symptom of a wider throwaway society.

However, the place of creation in the postmodern context is over the self. Nature has come to be seen as practically a deity to be served. The virtues of ecological preservation are unquestioned by the majority of postmoderns, and the literal worship of nature through pagan religions is on the rise in the West, with significant representation of the “Covenant of the Goddess” at the 2004 Parliament of World Religions. Meanwhile, the United Nations Environmental Protection Agency names Christianity as a source cause of environmental problems in its 1995 document, The Global Biodiversity Assessment.

In the postmodern context, morality is governed by personal choice. The popular way of judging whether something is morally acceptable is whether someone’s rights are perceived to be in danger of being violated. Anything is permissible, then, as long as “no one gets hurt.” Each individual defines his own morality based on his perception and interpretation of individual, personal rights. It can be said that in the postmodern context, life is lived for “whatever.” If there is no objective truth, and morality is governed by personal choice, then the purpose of life is determined by the sovereignty of each individual. It is no longer asked, “Is it true?” Rather, it is asked, “Do I like it?”

The Modern Worldview

One can see that the 200-year-old experiment of western modernism (roughly from the mid 18th Century through the mid 20th Century) is in every way a reaction to what was western premodernism. During the age of liberation and the development of individualism in Europe, a revolutionary new “Enlightenment” in thought and practice transformed western civilization. With the rise of scientific discovery, new educational initiatives, world exploration, technological inventions, and medical advancements, a profound optimism gripped the West. This created a radically new worldview. Writers such as David Hume in England and Immanuel Kant in Germany published works that challenged the status quo and began to influence the popular western imagination.

No longer was the West a prisoner to superstition. Secular natural explanations for all of life’s experiences were being discovered and hypothesized. With the rise of individualism, rational thought replaced corrupt monarchs and Church despots as the final authority. No longer did an individual have to languish under the autocratic rule of tyrannical rule. Every individual could question “truth,” as it had been handed down to him by government and religious institutions. No longer did life have to be governed by fear. Rather, rational thought replaced institutional superstitious ideas with reasonable principles. One could reason out an individual’s rights, freedoms, and responsibilities based on the scientific method. Individuals were now democratically free to design for themselves a personal interpretation of truth for life and faith. The most popular form of entertainment in Western Europe and America became rational debates between famous orators.

The place of God, therefore, was seen not only as distant, but as absent. All moral questions of life and faith could be answered through the application of biblical principles, in the same way as all physical problems could be answered through the application of scientific principles. In a sense, a living God was no longer needed. He could be replaced by a rational deism. The place of self in the modern paradigm was no longer seen as under the right of church and state rulers. Rather, it was seen as at the center, under no one. Each individual self was his own authority, possessing his own personal rights. American cultural critic George Steiner writes, The arbitrariness of all aesthetic propositions, of all value judgments is inherent in human consciousness and human speech. Anything can be said about anything…A critical theory, an aesthetic, is a politics of taste…No aesthetic proposition can be termed either “right” or “wrong.” The sole appropriate response is personal assent or dissent.

The place of others was seen as existing for mutual benefit. An optimism for western government fueled European missionary zeal to bring “good government” to all people. Colonial expansion brought western law, morality, and commerce to all areas of the planet. The place of creation was seen as coming under the self. Nature was no longer seen as being an equal competitor with the self, but rather as a resource to be subdued, controlled, and exploited by modern people. Likewise, morality was no longer governed by the irrational dictates of premodern rulers, but by ethics, derived from the rational interpretation of biblical principles. Ethical principles were imposed on people and society from the outside to control moral behavior. Finally, under the modern paradigm, all of life was lived for the glory of human progress. The human being was sovereign and all that served human enterprise was considered good and right.

Everywhere modernism judged premodernism as wrong, it was right. The superstitious nature of life in premodern western civilization was oppressive. Individuals were often subjugated to corrupt rulers wielding unreasonable power. Natural pestilence and discomfort were a cruel experience. Modern advances in medicine, education, technology, and science have helped the entire world. Unfortunately, in reaction to the excesses of premodernism, western civilization established modernism as a just-as-wrong alternative to biblical Christianity.